Steppenwolf Theatre Company Blog – Chicago Theater, World-Class Ensemble

First off, a quick introduction. Hi! I’m Patrick Holland. I’m a freelance theater director, and I’m serving as the Assistant Director on Fake. My job is basically to support and observe Eric Simonson, the director and playwright.

At this point in the process, we have left the cozy confines of our rehearsal hall. Back there, the set was imaginary. Instead of actual walls, pieces of tape were placed on the floor to indicate where the walls would be onstage. Think Les Nessman on WKRP in Cincinnati. Some of the props used in the rehearsal hall were real. The Piltdown Man skull we rehearsed with is the exact same prop the actors will use onstage in performance. Other props we used were simply stand-ins for the real ones. At one point, the actor Larry Yando ended up using a necktie as a camera strap while his real prop was being constructed. We all found him very silly wearing this temporary prop.

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Hi, I’m Gary Simmers and, for the upcoming production of Fake, I have the honor of understudying Francis Guinan and Alan Wilder. So this begs the question: what does an understudy do?

If you’ve been to prior productions, you may remember seeing a few non-descript people slipping in the back of the theatre just before the lights go down. You may also remember seeing these same folks disappearing quickly after the show is ended. Congratulations! You have seen an understudy in the wild!

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(Larry plays Charles Dawson and Henry Billings in Fake)

Every five or six years, Eric Simonson’s path and my own manage to cross. Just out of The Theatre School, Eric cast me in a project he was doing with Harry Lennix, The Kiss of the Spider Woman. Time passed. Roy Cohn in his Angels in America. Time. Mother Courage and Her Children at this theater… now, here again, Fake. And he wrote this one, too. Eric times x2. Exciting.

But any sense of the “familiar” or of a “history” on this project ends there.

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